SEMI-CONSCIOUS LIBERATION ORGANIZATION, Continued...
Arriving in Paris in 1970, Stein fell in with a group of young Enrages, veterans of the French student movement and the Situationist International who had nearly succeeded in toppling the government of Charles de Gaulle.
 By 1973, Stein had relocated to San Francisco, where she worked for a white organization that was affiliated with the Black Panther Party. Later, she became a union organizer, leading a successful action by laid-off maintenance workers who created a stink during the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting.
It was then that Stein met a man named “Andy,” a typesetter and community organizer who worked with one of her friends at a San Francisco print shop. “Andy” had been systematically organizing non-union workers at the shop. Stein was impressed with the thoroughness of his organizing technique:
“His method was to look to every individual in the shop,” she says, and to conduct “a political/psychological assessment of who they were, and which way they might turn.”
It was “Andy” who introduced Stein to the "O."
“He was escaping, and on his way out,” she says, “but he managed to suck me in as sort of his last act.”
Andy had left the Organization “because he was coming out as a gay man and he knew that this organization wasn’t going to let him come out.” Like many Marxist-Leninist organizations operating in the mid-seventies, the "O." weren’t open to homosexuals; these groups saw gay men in particular as "a product of the degeneracy which characterizes bourgeois society in decay."
Despite his misgivings, Andy continued to make use of the "O’s" “Internal Transformation Process” or “ITP” -a combination of 70’s pop psychology and Maoist ideology. It was the “ITP” that formed the backbone of the "O's" revolutionary theory: according to the "O.," it was only by struggling to overcome their bourgeois upbringing that young white radicals could hope to become “proletarianized.”
“A ‘proletarianized’ person,” says Stein, “was kind of the ideal transformed revolutionary –which is different than a working class person.” Proletarianized persons were expected to have control over their emotions. They wouldn’t be “subjective.” Subjectivity was a bourgeois failing. Many Leftists were already familiar with the Maoist concept of self-criticism, so in some ways, this seemed like a natural development.
“Interestingly, I think the New Age self-help crap mixes with the Maoist crap and makes a very potent thing,” says Stein.
It wasn’t long before Stein had submitted to what Andy called “the Assessment Process,” a detailed “class-based analysis” of her entire life history, religion, ethnicity, family history, and personality. The assessment concluded with a set of written recommendations aimed at helping Stein to strengthen her “rising proletarian side."
Stein was quite taken with the assessment process. Over the next two years, she and her friends made frequent use of the assessments during union organizing drives and in the weekly meetings of their semi-secret political “unit” (an outgrowth of Marxist study groups).
Having learned of this mysterious organization that had developed the assessment process, Stein was eager to know more about them. Through Andy, she was led to believe that the "O." had ties to James Forman (the former secretary of SNCC) and with the league of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit.
In the spring of 1980, Andy received a written memo inviting one of the members of their “unit” to come for a visit. As the group’s official representative, Stein was put in contact with "O." cadre in Minneapolis. In April of 1980, she flew to Minnesota for a rendezvous with the "O." |
